Lytro Camera: How Pro Shooters Use Its Amazing Lens Technology

Share

Lytro Camera: How Pro Shooters Use Its Amazing Lens Technology

A little over a month ago, the revolutionary Lytro light-field camera became available for pre-order. But a few lucky pro photographers have been using the Lytro and its "living picture" technology for the last few months, and now we can see their stunning results.

Wired.com recently chatted with photographers Stephen Boxall and Richard Koci Hernandez, who have been using the Lytro for two months and four months, respectively. Above, you can see one of Boxall's photos taken in a zero-gravity environment. Click around the image, and prepare to be amazed by an image that can change focus on the fly.

"The best thing about shooting the Lytro is that you have in your hands the biggest advance in photographic technology since we first started focusing light onto silver halides," Boxall says. "It's a magical thing to see the picture change and sharpen after you've taken it."

Lytro's camera is vastly different from the normal digital or film cameras you're used to. To snap its images, it uses light-field technology, which positions an array of micro-lenses over the camera's sensor. These micro-lenses capture up to 11 million rays of light. Because so much light is captured in a single image, you don't need to worry about focusing when you shoot your picture – you can focus an image after the fact. Lytro calls this resulting interactive photograph a "living picture."

In the photos in this post, you can click around to change the focus from a weightless drop of water, to someone floating in the foreground or background of the scene.

So is it hard to use?

"It's as easy and intuitive and familiar as any normal point-and-shoot," Hernandez says. "But to really see the benefits of a Lytro picture, you have to think differently, almost in 3-D."

The camera itself has only three buttons: a power button, shutter button, and zoom button. At the rear of the rectangular device is a touchscreen LCD that you use to compose shots. The living pictures the Lytro camera takes are square-shaped, and most closely proximate a 6MP to 8MP image, in Hernandez's opinion.

"There is no learning curve to operate the camera whatsoever – it is as simple as depressing the shutter," Boxall says. But "to make creative images with great shifts of focus within the square format is challenging, both creatively and technically," he says.

In its current form, this camera is a great tool for the amateur photographer, these two professionals suggest.

But taking the pictures is only half the fun.

"Sharing the pictures is my favorite part of using the camera," Hernandez says. He loves seeing the reactions of his friends and family as they're viewing the light-field pictures he's taken. He snapped a picture of his daughter in the backyard, with grass and flowers in the foreground and his daughter toward the back, and showed it to her grandmother. "It was amazing," Hernandez says, to see the initial reaction as he clicked to refocus the photo from the flowers to his daughter.

Hernandez is also a fan of the Lytro's unique design. He loves its small form factor, but says he sometimes doesn't know quite how to hold it. "The design is so unconventional, kind of like a stick of butter," Hernandez says. He likens the feeling of holding this strange new device to when he first got his hands on a first-generation iPod.

Boxall thinks Lytro and light-field technology have a bright future.

"I see light-field technology and sensors being in every camera, both stills, video and motion picture," he said.

Boxall also sees light-field technology, like that in the Lytro, eventually being used to create 3-D movies. 3-D images could be rendered in real-time to an audience, and the audience's eyes could be tracked using motion-sensing and facial recognition technology to determine where each person is looking at the film onscreen.

"Now you are able to look around the head of your favorite movie star to see what's happening behind them whilst having the scene refocus wherever you look," Boxall says.

Lytro won't begin shipping to the rest of us until early 2012. Until then, you can check out more living photos at Lytro's website.